Moving Desire Through a Machinic Assemblage. Rethinking Transmediality with Man Ray
Moving Desire Through a Machinic Assemblage. Rethinking Transmediality with Man Ray

Summary/Abstract: Art in the period immediately after World War I witnessed a general interest in becoming more machine-like, and artists like Man Ray (1890-1976) challenged the functions of the basic optical machines used by artists. Instead of using the camera as a machine for making documents, Ray used it as an instrument for exploring ‘desire’. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of desire, I propose that, with Ray, desire entered the process and became the purpose of flows, multiplicities, production, and repeated reproduction. This claim is supported by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, when they assert that “desire is not primarily connected to a specific object, but is always the desire of an arrangement (assemblage)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In such constellation, ‘desire’ becomes part of diverse processes that mark the “transition” of the object to the image and vice versa, as typified in Man Ray’s art. Likewise, machine is a tool at the service of Ray’s mind, be it automatism characteristic of the surrealism or subverting typical means of reproducibility. The hypothesis is that, when observed from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic approach, the foundations of Man Ray’s painting can be contextualized as machinic, in a close connection with the concept ‘desiring-machines’. The aim of this paper is to renew a concern with the medium by looking at the transmedia nature of Man Ray’s painting as being machinic. The transmedia nature of Ray’s painting will be examined in the case of his painting DANGER/DANCER. L’impossibilité (1917-1920), by looking at how ‘desiring-machine’ undermines ordinary machine functions.

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